Justice Department Making Sure Nortel Patents Weren’t Purchased Simply to Hobble Smartphones Running Android

I’ll just start this off by quoting Eric Schmidt again, since the state of the tech world couldn’t have been described any better:

“We have seen an explosion of Android devices entering the market and, because of our successes, competitors are responding with lawsuits as they cannot respond through innovations.”

To follow that up, we wanted to point out that the Justice Department is ramping up its probe over the purchase of Nortel’s some 6,000 patents by Rockstar Bidco (Apple, RIM, Microsoft, Ericsson, Sony, and EMC) and whether or not this group acquired them to simply attack Android smartphones.  If we take a look at that group, it would certainly appear as if they had no other reason, but we’ll leave that to the government to decide.

Back in April, the Justice Department stepped in to thwart another consortium of companies (Apple, Oracle and Microsoft) from using their recently acquired patent portfolio to unfairly hurt rivals.  All we can hope for is a similar outcome, so that we can get on with our smartphone infested lives.

All I really know though, is that I’m sick of seeing a new lawsuit filed each day by Apple against another company.

Via:  WSJ

Cheers jeesung!